Electronic mail (email) communications are an integral part of any business, and widely used outside of business as well. Although several new technologies currently compete, as the most ubiquitous tool in business communications, email remains one of the single most used communications tools for both the business and the personal user. Widespread availability, ease of use, and functionality are key components which hold email in front of developing communications methods; however, as new technologies compete for the top spot, email applications must continue to build upon the strong foundation currently in place to maintain their edge as the tool of choice. By any current standard, email applications would have to be rated as mature technology; however, if improvements in email applications cease to move forward, and other tools continue to improve, loss of market share will undoubtedly result.
One key feature missing in legacy email tools is a proactive system to ensure timely responses to messages. The average email user receives many (tens/hundreds) of email messages every day/week. It is currently a very cumbersome task to track messages, which a user has either sent or received, in which a reply message is both requested and expected. A user's in-box may at any given point contain many active “active” documents, and the process of identifying messages which the user must reply to, or messages the user is awaiting a reply upon, is manual and very inefficient.
As an example, in the current method, a user first creates an email message. The user can then mark the email message “reply requested” and select a reply requested by date option. At this point, the current email application functionality ends. In legacy email systems selecting these “advanced functions” through the email menus, in Lotus Notes for example, does nothing more than add the following unremarkable lines to the header of the note.
“Received: Sep. 12, 2002 04:34 PM
Please respond by Sep. 13, 2002”
In reviewing email applications, it is difficult to determine whether setting “reply request” actually did anything, and in most cases very close scrutiny of the note was necessary to even determine the feature had enabled in the note received. This feature in legacy email systems does very little to ensure that firstly, the user even notices a reply has been requested, and that the secondly, a prompt reply will be received.
Ease of use and best breed functionality are imperative in modern email systems. Many user interface enhancements have been added to email systems over the past several years; however, room for improvement continues to exist. One current shortfall in legacy email systems is the lack of a proactive system whereby users are reminded of due, or overdue, replies to previously-received email messages.
With legacy email functionality, it is only with great difficulty that the user can open his or in-box and determine which messages require action, and what the respective priority of each of the messages requiring action should be. During busy periods, this information is imperative, as the user may otherwise be determined to be unresponsive, when in fact the user may simply be responding to messages of lower priority. In order to correct this problem, a system is needed in which the user will be assisted through reminder messages, and the message sender is also reminded of due/overdue responses.
Therefore, there remains a need for a method and system that can notify an electronic mail message recipient of the requirement to reply to the received message and the requirements surrounding such a message reply. The present invention addresses these shortcomings and will now be described in additional detail through a practical example of usage.